


Small Town Homo

by Anonymous



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: And the Other Losers, Coming Out 2: Electric Boogaloo, Gay Richie Tozier, Good Parents Maggie & Wentworth Tozier, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M, Richie Tozier's Stand-Up Act
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-19
Updated: 2019-09-19
Packaged: 2020-10-24 05:31:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20700737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Sequel to New Material- Richie gets that stand-up special.





	Small Town Homo

**Author's Note:**

> His parents are still alive because I say so (and because he and Eddie deserve to have one set of parents who TRY and who CARE)

“Heyyy, everybody.” Richie hunches his shoulders a little, does an awkward shuffle and wave, before his posture relaxes and he laughs, turns his head to the side a little. 

Eddie is sitting between Bill and Bev, in the front row, in a little VIP section-- to Bill’s other side is Mike, enjoying this stop on the freedom tour, and to Mike’s other side, the Toziers, and Eddie doesn’t know if they go to their son’s shows often-- he wouldn’t assume so, given the material he’s been doing for most of his career, but… who can say. He looks down the row and takes them all in, and then peers past Bev to where Ben is sitting, and it feels good in ways he can’t quite articulate, to be with them all now, and to see them all riveted to Richie.

“So, I’m assuming everyone here knows all about The Breakdown.” Richie continues, leaning against his mic stand. “If for some reason you’re here and you don’t actually know who I am, uh, you’re in for a treat, but the short version is, you know, like… I get called to this little reunion in my hometown, with all these losers I’ve forgotten to get famous-- no, no, I mean… like, these are the best people I’ve ever known, right? And we haven’t seen each other in years. And then immediately, like, _ immediately_, I also find out my childhood best friend is dead, and so now we’re doing The Big Chill, right? Have you guys seen The Big Chill, or am I just old? Actually, I’m not old enough to have seen The Big Chill when it came out, I was a _ kid_, that’s a movie for depressed, lonely thirtysomethings. So now, technically, I’m almost too old for The Big Chill. Right, sorry, this was supposed to be the _ short _ version. And it doesn’t start out very funny, so, we’re off to a _ great _ start. Anyway, yeah. So a _ potent _ cocktail of grief, insomnia, and actual cocktails later, I’m on camera having a full on breakdown in the _ only _ remotely nice restaurant in my hometown. Keeping in mind I've already had the mini-breakdown in front of an audience. Like, it’s a mess, and also, we’re all in fuckin… _ mourning _ and we all hauled ass out there and we’re all operating on no sleep, and so, you know… nobody’s super rational and it’s… it’s a great video, actually. I scream at a literal child. Which, like… literal child I screamed at, please have your people contact my people, because I feel like I should send you to an amusement park or something. I mean, I gotta, right? I owe that guy, I think he’s a meme now, isn’t that awful? Do you think he’s watching? I mean… probably not, right?”

He does a take, sips at his water, paces the stage a little. He’d done interviews about it, where he really talked about Stan and about how he _ wished _ he could blame his freak-out on cocaine, because cocaine would probably be a hell of a lot more fun than just sleep deprivation and sadness. Not like he could talk about the demon clown thing, but as he’d pointed out while he was doing his public apologies, every comedian has two things-- a barely-managed mental illness, and at least one friend who’s committed suicide. People have accepted his explanations. People have mostly been understanding. The honesty probably helps.

“Anyway. That’s not what you’re here for, that stuff’s already on the internet forever. You’re here for the big juicy thing, right? The gay stuff? Show of hands, who was expecting me to, like, change my look at all after I came out of the closet? Yeah, right? ‘Cause, like, the funny gay guys on TV, they’re all _ super _ put together, aren’t they? These guys dress great, and they teach _ you _ how to dress great, and I’m wearing a hawaiian shirt with like, lobsters on it. _ Cargo pants_. I’m not one of those sophisticated gays. I look like a guy who finds food in his beard, and that’s when I’m clean-shaven. Who thought I was going to suddenly look a lot better, like this was just my straight guy disguise? No one is more disappointed than I am, but this is really just me-- well, no. My boyfriend is the one who kissed a real frog here and wound up with a gay-ass frog on his hands when he could have had a prince. My boyfriend is super put together. _ Super _ put together. You wanna hear about how I bagged this guy?”

Eddie slumps down in his seat, hand over his face, as the rest of the Losers cheer and whistle. 

“Well, okay, so this does go back to the reunion, actually. Because I show up for this reunion, right? All these guys I haven’t seen since we were kids, _ including _ my top secret boyhood crush.And I walk into the restaurant, and I see… just, like, the _ hottest _ guy. Like if you could design the most handsome man in the world, you _ might _ come up with someone this good-looking. Plus, he’s, like… he’s hugely successful, absolutely out of my league. That’s not him, by the way, I’m talking about our buddy, Ben. Ben, you’re so hot! Ben is rich, actually. Like, all these guys grew up hot-- _ massively _ unfair that I grew up gay and they grew up hot, imagine going to a reunion and everyone is a supermodel and you’re a repressed small town homo, and also, this is your face.” He gestures to himself. “Anyway, yeah, Ben is off the market, ladies, just so you know. And I’m very happy for him, but I did entertain a five second fantasy where he was my sugar daddy. So Ben is hot. And Mike is hot. And Bill-- Actually, Bill, I thought you’d be hotter. No, he’s hot, he’s hot. The point is, everyone is hot, and I’m there as well, and then I look over, and I see Eddie… man, and it’s just over for me at that point. Like I look at him and Celine Dion starts singing in my head, _ it’s all coming back to me now_, is this really the boy whose cheeks I used to pinch in middle school? Oh gosh, he’s so cute. Oh man, he’s so cute I might literally vomit. When did he go from twink to twunk? Does he still wear short shorts? You guys, I used to have daily crises over this boy’s legs. And I’m panicking because I’m all the way in Narnia, I’m so deep in the closet, and I did not expect this, and we’re not getting together in a real city, okay. You New York City gays, you all think you’re living _ the _ gay experience, but let me tell you. I set one foot in that town and I thought I was in the closet before, but now I’m like… actively panicking. It makes you paranoid, man! I left that part out of the apology tour, before I came out, but being back in your small town and having your own Gay Feelings Renaissance makes you paranoid! This guy is so cute I’m _ sweating_, and like… here’s the thing, if my buddy Ben got all sweaty, he’d look like a sexy music video, he’d be hot. When I sweat, I look like I have a medical condition. And Eddie’s got this thing about germs, so I’m thinking it’s not a good look, not very seductive.”

Eddie’s heard the whole act before, he’s been there the whole time Richie was writing and refining it, but even with how many times he’s heard it and how many variations, he still finds himself laughing right along with the crowd, to the point of tears. Richie had called his short shorts _ integral _ to the success of the bit, and he’s not sorry he gave in.

“Anyway, so we’re like… drinking and arm-wrestling-- yeah, arm-wrestling, the number one pastime of all repressed small town gays, right? ‘Cause you get to hold a boy’s hand and still look macho? And maybe you, like… you let him kind of almost win for a while just so you can keep holding his hand? And you _ know _ , right, you know he’s not going to tell you you’re _ so strong _ when it’s over, but you still kind of want him to. Like, hi, cute boy, how’d you like to notice my muscles? You wanna go best two out of three? Three out of five? I could hold hands all night, just saying. So we’re doing that, and… a bunch of shit happens. Honestly, just, a bunch of shit happens on this trip, and I wind up with the world’s cutest boyfriend. He’s a toy breed-- he will try to tell me he’s average height, and he’s _ not_. Babe, you’re not, I looked it up. Not in America, honey. But-- now, this is true, when I was fact-checking my boyfriend, I learned that the most _ attractive _ height is actually a little under the national average. Someone did _ science _ for this! And they didn’t have to, they could have just asked me. Science should have just asked me, a sample size of one incredibly biased moron, if short guys are hotter than average guys. And I’m pretty sure at this point he’d like to point out that he’s not that much shorter than I am, but you know… it’s enough. Four inches counts for a lot. It’s enough, he’s cute and it kills me. I’ve been in a constant crisis over how cute this boy is since age seven or eight, okay? And I didn’t know what ‘gay’ was back then, I didn’t think about romance, I just knew if you lined up every boy I knew, like… and asked me who my favorite was, if you asked me at age eight to pick my favorite boy-- you know, a perfectly normal hypothetical-- I wouldn’t pick my best friend, I wouldn’t pick my _ second _ best friend, day one of knowing this boy and I’d pick him. ‘Cause he’s _ so _ small and he’s so _ cute_. You just wanna… hold him. Or like, come up with excuses to wrestle. Throw stuff at him ‘cause he gets all cute when he’s angry.”

Bill and Bev are both elbowing Eddie throughout, laughing-- Bev winds up with an arm around him, her head against his, and Eddie tries to think of a time he’s been happier, and he can’t. He really can’t. He relaxes against her, and he doesn’t have to look around to know-- to know that on Bev’s other side, Ben is leaning against her, and that while Bill is holding onto his arm, he’s also holding onto Mike’s, that all five of them are connected as they watch, that all five of them are projecting the purest, fiercest love Richie’s way, and it’s everything it is because it’s all of them.

“So, the unavoidable part of the small town homo experience-- after arm-wrestling-- is that you’ve got your small town parents. Mine are cool, mine are pretty cool. I mean, they had a hard time with it at first. I called them up and came out, before I did the show where I came out to most of the planet. Felt it was only polite. That’s not the kind of thing you want your parents learning because someone tagged them on facebook to watch a video of you doing dick jokes, right? That’s the worst, the worst way to come out to your parents is for one of their friends to show them a video of you talking about your boyfriend’s dick. No, I called them up when Eddie and I officially moved in together, and I didn’t even mention him at first, I just said I was gay, and-- well, you can imagine, right? My small town gays in the audience, my nor’easter small town gays? You ever talk to your folks about your sexuality? That’s a fun talk, right? _ Ayuh, well, reckon you’ll want to watch out for yourself, now, sonny. I hear those city gays like to use the drugs and touch the butt. Don’t much care for that, now, do we_? But my folks were great. They were very worried about me-- you know, because of the drugs and the butt stuff and the STDs and the hate crimes, like, we moved out of Derry, but gays are very much in season. Hate crimes did not go out of vogue in my hometown. And there was that moment where I had to swear my mom did not make me gay because she wanted a daughter. And so I’m trying to be like, you know, mom and dad, don’t worry. I’m not going to go out to any ‘drug orgies’ and I’m safe, I live in a very nice area where I won’t get my ass beat for holding hands with a boy, and they’re doing their best, but they were freaked. They were freaked out. And then I mention Eddie, and everything changes, okay?”

Richie pauses for effect, and Eddie glances down at the Toziers. They’d been very nice to him at dinner, but he hasn’t really spoken much with them-- with the whole gang there, he’d been able to be quiet. Of course, they were sharing a nice hotel suite with them, so it’s not like Eddie could avoid the parent issue forever, and of course Richie had told him they were cool about it, of course he knows how the story ends, but even so… somehow it wasn’t until he’s hearing it just a few feet down from Maggie and Went themselves that it’s felt real.

“I mention Eddie, and my dad, he _ immediately_\-- So, okay, so my dad’s a dentist, right, a retired dentist? He _ immediately _ says _ oh, not little Eddie with the perfect teeth_? Like, my dad approves of this boy so much, he’s _ thrilled _ I have a boyfriend who flosses! _ Maggie, did you hear that_? _ Oh, ayuh, reckon I did, that nice clean boy_. Now there’s a boy who won’t do drugs or neglect his teeth or… whatever other things my parents worry about gay people. Now I know ‘poor dental hygiene’ is not one of the usual stereotypes you hear about gays, that’s just my dad’s standards for anybody. He thinks I don’t floss enough. And he’s right! So you can imagine his delight when I tell him my boyfriend is an anal retentive with zero cavities. Now they’re convinced that I’m going to be whipped into shape, my house is going to be clean, I’m going to use mouthwash… You know what, they’re not wrong, he’s really good for me, you guys. He’s really good for me. His toothbrush is from the _ future _ and he’s my ideal man.”

He grins, open and goofy, and Eddie lets out a whoop that has Richie laughing up on stage and pointing towards him.

“There he is! Can we get a camera pushing in on my spaghetti, please? Camera two, you got a good shot at him? I _ really _ think people need to see how cute this man is. Like it’s not just me, right? Am I crazy here, or is that an adorable man? Ohh, I bet he’s blushing. This bit is not scripted, I ran so much stuff past him but he pretends really hard that he hates when I call him Eddie Spaghetti. He pretends so hard to hate it, you guys. Oh, fuck, _ cute_.” Richie turns to the screen behind him, where one of the cameras has finally found Eddie in the crowd and put him up there for the world to see. 

Eddie, consequently, is hiding his blushing face in his hands and trying not to grin, while Bill and Bev prod at him and laugh, and Ben and Mike crowd in to try and be in the shot, everyone waving.

“See? And also, I mean, you can see how attractive all of these people are. In case you thought I was making that up. I want to point out that we were the _ Losers _ when we were kids, that’s with a capital L. We were the weird-looking nerds, and now look at… like, everyone but me.”

“You’re sexy!” Eddie shouts, laughing. He’s sure he’s not audible over the laughter of a crowd this size, this is nothing like the little club where Richie first came out. But he’s still up on the monitor and anyone who can lip read can make a guess.

“Thanks, babe. Everyone knows you’re lying, but thank you.” Richie blows him a kiss. “This isn’t radio, they can all see me. My face is like seven feet tall on this screen and five of those are forehead, they know.”

“Super sexy!” Eddie adds, hands cupped around his mouth, and there’s a brief moment where Richie’s smile is for him alone, as if the whole theater just didn’t exist around them, as if there was no crowd… It’s a soft smile, one that crumples gently under the weight of a lifelong love, one that comes with slightly-wet eyes.

The routine goes on-- it’s not all ‘the juicy gay stuff’, Richie talks about discovering ADHD way too late in life to do him any good in school, about sleep problems-- he can’t delve into all of them, of course, can’t talk about the real trauma he’ll probably spend his whole life recovering from, but he’s more than honest enough to make Eddie achingly, heart-rendingly proud of him.

“So I have… _ wild _ nightmares, you guys. Like crazy nightmares. Like, once a week, I wake my boyfriend up screaming about how the clown is gonna get me this time. Oh, yeah. It’s a clown. That’s what I’m afraid of-- it’s okay, you can laugh, this is a comedy special, after all. I’ve been afraid of clowns in a big way since I was a kid, and invariably, _ invariably_, when I let my guard down and I confide this deepest, darkest fear, _ invariably_, whatever friend or loved one I am talking to will get this real sympathetic look. They’ll nod. They’ll put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Oh, that must be real hard for you’, they’ll say. And I’m like, yeah, it is, because it’s a stupid irrational fear that I’ve had bed-shaking nightmares about my whole life, it is hard for me. And then, the composure cracks. _ Invariably_, you guys, because ‘I mean, like, can you never look at yourself in a mirror, or…?’, that’s what I get for opening up. The real clown is me.” Richie spreads his arms, the audience goes wild. “So fuck all those guys, right?”

Eddie whoops, and gets another smile that’s just for him, a little shake of the head as Richie points to him.

“He’s a trooper, because he does the one thing I’ll never be brave enough to do, he sleeps next to a clown every night. No, um… no, I’ll be real honest, honesty hour, spaghetti man, you are absolutely the bravest man I’ve ever met, and you’re the reason I’m brave.” He says, and this… this was not part of any of the re-works and rehearsals he’s ever done in front of Eddie, though it sounds prepared. “You really are. Like, you know you’re the reason I faced down… all the bad shit from when we were kids, the bullies and the nightmares and the… whole sexual identity crisis it took me long enough to get the fuck over.”

Eddie is crying, he thinks, but he Bev and Bill are gripping his hands tight and he can hear Ben sniffling like crazy. So at least if he’s crying, he’s not the only one. But he really hopes the camera guy has the decency not to put his teary face on a giant screen and subsequently a Netflix special.

“Two other really wild things happened, the week our friend died and we all got together.” Richie continues, this time out to the rest of the crowd. “Well, no, like… a _ fuckton _ of things happened in just a couple days, but… two other important things happened. Um, one of them was a, a hate crime in our hometown. A guy who… a couple of guys who could have been my Eddie, if he hadn’t gotten the hell out when we were young, if he’d been… If we’d been-- They could have been us, like… if we were a little younger. If I hadn’t grown up quite so afraid. This is the news story my repressed gay ass comes home to, when I roll into town. And, uh, so this part is… majorly unfunny, because one of these guys, he’s dead too now, he’s… So, like… here I am, mourning my childhood best friend and a perfect stranger I can’t explain my connection to. ‘Cause it’s not like we’ve ever met. The only reason I have for caring so much is… this enormous secret I’ve been keeping. Well, that and being a _ decent fucking person_, but some of you guys come from small towns, right?” He nods, sardonic smile twisting at his mouth a moment before he gets serious again. “The second thing is, Eds almost dies, in a _ freak _ accident. And freak accidents are his bag, he’s a risk analyst, which is apparently a real thing and also the exact job you would imagine him having if you knew him as a kid, even if you didn’t know it was a real thing. He almost dies in a freak accident. And it’s all too much, and suddenly I’m like… I can do this. I can tell him. I can tell him everything, because the thing is… if I lose him because it weirds him out that I’m in love with him after all these years, it’s still better than losing him in a freak accident, right? I promise this is going to get funny again, by the way. Like, when I spilled my guts to him in the hospital, I got so nervous that I spontaneously started singing? And it wasn’t _ good _ singing, you guys, like... Eddie doesn’t even remember this, because he was tripping _ balls_. The only reason he’s with me is that he was so heavily medicated I got a do-over.”

“That’s not true!” Eddie laughs, when the camera cuts back to him and he sees his face projected up on the screen beside Richie. 

“You say that now, you didn’t hear my Celine Dion impression. _ If you forgive me all this, I forgive you all that, we forgive and forget and it’s all coming back to me now…_” He sings-- if you can call it singing, it’s purposefully bad, high and reedy and nervous sounding. “I should have requested like, an industrial fan, I feel like my hair should be blowing back when I do this. Like, with a billowing shirt, maybe. Just to really highlight how _ un_sexy that was. No, no, that’s… I don’t think that was the song, I think I busted out fucking Toto on this guy, it’s a little fuzzy, I remember it was bad and then _ I _ passed out. So yeah, so my boyfriend almost died, we hooked up, it was _ way _ better than I thought it would be when I was a kid and I didn’t really know how kissing worked, let alone sex. That’s the one upside to getting together when you’re pushing forty instead of pushing fourteen, you know what you’re doing. Well, _ we _ didn’t, but somehow these two former closet cases made it work. And then, like… I don’t know if any of you have almost died before-- oh, really? Hey, man, really glad you’re here. It’s a bitch, right? Like, there’s fuckin’... physical therapy and shit! There are so many doctor’s visits. And so we move in together unofficially basically right off the bat just because someone’s gotta be there during his recovery, and after that, like, moving in together officially just makes sense, but-- So, we move in together unofficially so I can be there if there’s an emergency, and so I can help him change his bandages, he doesn’t need me to organize his pills or anything but he’s not allowed to drive himself to his appointments for a long-ass time and like… shit’s complicated, right? So we’re doing all this medical stuff…”

Eddie groans, knowing exactly where this is going. But he’d given permission for the bit, after all. He just hadn’t anticipated the possibility of the camera cutting to him. 

“And I get called in at the tail end of a lot of his appointments so his doctors can give me instructions, and this doctor calls me in, and she’s like ‘Okay, so your boyfriend should have a rescue inhaler for his asthma’. And that’s when I say ‘My boyfriend doesn’t have asthma. He’s just a bitch-ass faker’. I say this… _ so _ confidently. Because when we were kids, he had fake asthma. If you think that sounds crazy, I promise you it is so much crazier than you think it is. Because he wasn’t faking asthma-- no, see, he used to get panic attacks where he couldn’t breathe, but it’s totally a mental thing, it’s not a problem with his lungs. And his _ mother_, who was a _ piece of work_, she says he’s got asthma. She gets these fucking fake inhalers. She constructs this whole fantasy world where this tiny little _ spitfire _ of a boy is frail and sick and can’t fuckin’ play with other kids because of all his fake medical conditions. She makes up additional allergies he’s never had. Flips out over every sniffle. But like, for years, we all just accept it, until he finds out it’s all a severely creepy throne of lies. But here’s the thing I didn’t know, right? Adult-onset asthma is a real thing, and it turns out when you’re in a _ freak accident _ and you _ almost die _ and you had a _ hole in your chest_, like… that’s the kind of thing that can give you asthma? So I look like a _ dick_. This doctor isn’t sure whether to be horrified or what, so she settles for asking me where I went to medical school, and _ this guy_, this guy is laughing his _ ass _ off, because _ he knew I’d say that_. He knew! He knew I was going to call him a bitch-ass faker right in front of his doctor, who had the tests in her hand, saying he has really real asthma now. But I love it when he’s mean to me.”

Once again, he looks directly at Eddie, though this time it’s less ‘heartfelt confession’ and more ‘eyebrow-waggling leer’. 

“Which is all the time.” He continues, with the fondest fucking smile. “Ask any of our friends what we were like as kids, like… I’ll go down and hand the microphone to Bill-- oh? Oh, guys, Bill says no, he doesn’t want me to jump off the stage and give him the mic, but he would tell you, like… from the moment we _ met_, it’s just been… a lifetime of fucking pigtail pulling. Do you know why I became a comedian? Because when I was a kid… the only time I ever felt really, really _ good_, was if I could make this tiny-ass little fucker laugh. And he’s a tough room, okay? Like I had to be _ actually _ funny, my old act wouldn’t have cut it. Actually, this asshole, our first night back in our hometown, is calling me out for how my old act was not authentic material about my life, like he didn’t know shit about my adult life but he knew I wasn’t devoting five _ minutes _ of my time to thinking about tits, let alone five hours worth of stand-up material. Anyway, like I was saying, that was it, that was the thing that gave my life meaning, and if I couldn’t make him laugh, I’d do anything to get his attention any way I could get it, but… but then we both move away and we lose track of each other and… and no one person is filling that void, so I gotta get a whole _ room _ to laugh at me. And that works out okay, you know, I get by. I thrive off of attention the way only a small town homo can. ‘Cause if you can’t get what you really want, you figure out what you can have. If you’re lucky, you get real good at whatever will get a guy to look at you. You get up on stage, you tell jokes, you play the guitar, you go out for a sport, you… you make yourself valuable for something you _ do _ because you’re not allowed to ask a boy to like you for who you _ are_, and you definitely can’t ask him to be into making out under the bleachers. I got real lucky. Both because I was actually pretty funny as a kid-- don’t let my friends tell you otherwise!-- and because I knew Eds wasn’t going to make out with _ anyone _ under the bleachers, so it wasn’t personal if he didn’t do it with me. That’s how you get _ diseases_, you know. And grass stains. And other stains. And now I’m… just beyond lucky, because he’s let me cause a few good stains. And my parents are here tonight, so I want you all to imagine I’m talking about grass right now. Pro tip, do _ not _ invite your parents to the taping of your comedy special, it _ will _ ruin either your act or your ability to look your mother in the eye at the next family dinner.”

He runs through the rest of his act, and it’s as they’re all heading backstage after the show that Bev mentions how much _ lighter _ he looks.

“He’s had something on his shoulders since we were kids.” Mike nods. “Now he doesn’t. I know what that feels like.”

Eddie elbows his way around Bill to get his arm around Mike at that. They’re a knot of arms around waists and shoulders by the time they reach Richie, all five of them, Maggie and Went hovering nearby.

“Hey, unhand my man.” Richie grins, extracting Eddie from the middle of the group hug and planting a kiss on his cheek, cuddling him close a moment before he accepts hugs from the rest. “How was it?”

“Just unbelievable.” Eddie says, and it comes out far too fond to be teasing. 

“You were great.” Ben pulls him into a second hug, rocking him back and forth a moment before passing him off to Mike again, and finally down to his parents.

“A little blue.” His mother says, but there’s not much censure in it. “We’re so proud of you.”

“All that goofing around sure has paid off.” His father ruffles his hair. 

“We going out to celebrate? We having drinks?”

“We’re going to head back to the hotel, it’s pretty late for us old-timers. You go out with your friends.” 

Eddie is surprised when he’s granted the exact same affectionate goodbyes as Richie, the kiss to the cheek and the warm clap on the back, the half-hug and the beaming smiles. How long, he wonders, will he keep being surprised? Maybe a while.

“I hate to break it to you, but we’re all rapidly approaching old-timer status ourselves.” Ben grins. “No drinks, I don’t need the headache that’d give me.”

“Bet someone in this city delivers pizza this late.” Bill suggests. “You two can come over to the party suite.”

“Four responsible adults is a party suite now?”

“Do you want to come watch movies with us or not?”

“Yeah.” Richie leans in and pulls Bill in against his side-- Eddie under one arm and Bill under the other. “Let’s do that. Pizza’s on me.”


End file.
